I got my eyes fixed with LASIK a while back. I noticed glare and halos for a while, but they subsided. Overall I've been very satisfied with the how it went. I wish that more medical procedures worked this way.
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What makes LASIK differently from other medical procedures? Don't those work, too?
LASIK is purely mechanical and generally well-understood and the improvement is directly measurable and involves applying a particular fix and then you're done.
Dentistry can be like that too. As can some orthopedic stuff like setting a broken bone or replacing a hip. But most of the rest of medicine isn't like that.
Suppose you have high blood pressure or low blood pressure or balance issues or cancer or joint pain or acid reflux or arthritis or a lack of energy or are overweight. Doctors can give advice and prescribe treatment for any of those but most of it doesn't work very well. The best case might involve continuously taking pills and changing behavior for the entire rest of your life. There's very little where the doctor says "just do this one thing, let me turn this knob over here, and you're all better." In a lot of cases they can't even tell what's wrong, much less how to fix it, much less precisely how much it's going to cost to fix it.
In large part because LASIK is optional and usually not covered by insurance, it tends to be a FAR better experience than most other medicine. The pipeline is ridiculously optimized to make the operation fast and efficient and cheap and transparent. It would be awesome to have the equivalent of LASIK centers for every other kind of medicine, rather than the sort of confuseopoly we've got.
I've never had a medical procedure work like this. The office was transparent and prompt about everything. Every other encounter with the U.S. medical system I've had has been a confusing mess.
When I first visited the office they went over why I might not want to do the procedure.
Once they confirmed I was still interested, they did human and machine measurements and tests of my eyes, and showed me the results and told me what they meant. They took care to explain their error correction procedures.
After they'd done their tests they told me what the procedure would cost and scheduled it right away They explained what I'd need to do after the procedure (eye drops and followup visits) and what that would cost.
The day of, they saw me promptly. They did more verification, and then the procedure. They made sure I understood my instructions for post-op care (correcting my misunderstanding about some eye drops).
The procedure cost what they said it would, and at each followup appointment I was seen promptly and kept in the loop about my status.